Cold Heart (Compassionate Mission)

"How could we let our hearts go cold?"

Kay Warren from Saddleback Church in California, said this at the HIV and AIDS conference in November 2006. She was speaking of her confrontation with her own hardness of heart when she was first confronted with her own attitude towards AIDS and HIV. She was being massively honest while describing her amazing journey through brokenness to stand with the poor and the marginalised.

I am sitting in another hotel room, and I can't get this question that Kay Warren poses out of my head.

How could we let our hearts go so cold?

Cold hearts, it seems to me, are a contradiction to the churches mission to the poor.

I remember a time when my own heart was cold.

Freezing in fact.

Yeah, I journeyed from birth a Salvationist, doing Salvationist kind of things, in my case case you could call it going through the motions. I am a fifth generation Salvationist. It was taken as red that I would ingratiate into the ranks without question.

And I guess I didn't question it.

It was a way of life.

A kind of separate world to the big wide world.

I joined the brass band, after learning to play a cornet. I was made a junior soldier because that was what you did.

I had no choice.

I was made a senior soldier, again with no real choice.

The brass band became an obsession. I did all those mad things like live in fear of not wearing my cap from the car to the hall. Like sacrificing my possible football career because I couldn't play footy on Sundays.

I could list so much more of this madness.

I lived in a Salvation Army cocoon.

I had absolutely no idea about a relationship with God.

And my heart was cold.

And hard.

This carried on until I hit my thirties.

My heart was cold towards God.

My heart was cold towards anything really.

I had no idea that I could possibly make a difference in this world.

I had absolutely no idea what compassion was.

I remember sitting in the stands at the Heysel Stadium in Belgium on a balmy night I was there to watch my football team Liverpool playing in the European Cup final but ended up watching many people die in some of the worst football violence ever seen in Europe.

I remember feeling shocked at how cold my heart was back then.

I felt nothing.

I did not have any idea about compassion or even true passion.

Of course all that changed one day when I recognised my need of a Saviour when I took my first tentative steps into a relationship that will be forever.

When I encountered Jesus my hard heart softened, almost straight away. I began to see others differently. I began to open my emotions instead of stifling them. I began to see my family, my friends, the whole world in fact, in a completely different light.

I guess I was moved with compassion.

Compassion.

Let's put that another way.

A warm heart.

And further down the road of my relationship, my heart is getting warmer all the time.

I think I want to be bold prophetically in this blog post and please, I say this not in any judgemental way, no definitely not. And I am definitely not saying that everyone has cold hearts, no not at all. But I believe the spirit of God says, "The church cannot carry out its mission with cold hearts."

How can we see the pain of the broken with cold hearts?

How can we cry with the poor?

How can we reach those who need help, healing and life, without the compassion of a God who sent his only Son to die for me and for you?

What do you feel when you see the injustices worldwide on our TV news bulletins? What do you feel when you see thousands of children and whole families dying of aids? What do you feel when you see people dying of starvation when others have plenty?

Do you cry?

Do we feel anything?

Tonight as I sit and throw this around in my head I know this. My heart needs to continue softening to be able to respond to the needs of the world.

And the church has to be responding to the needs of the world.

Kay Warren states a challenging question. How could we let our hearts get so cold?

Sounds like she's generalising?

I don't think so.

I know when I look back at my life before the moment I encountered Jesus.

I can definitely pose that question to myself.

And maybe it's a question for someone out there reading this?

Maybe your tired of a cold and hard heart.

Maybe it's time for your heart to grow warm?